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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Who Is Giving The News Nets Their Marching Orders?

I was driving in my car this afternoon, listening to CNN Headline News on XM radio. Suddenly, I was subjected to a special report, referring to what would happen if the Democrats became the majority party. One by one, a series of potential horrors were being ticked off, as the potential chairpersons of various committees were named. It sounded like a GOP talking point, so I kept waiting for the report to be balanced out by how the Dems viewed these folks that were getting demonized. Shockingly, it never occurred. The report was so unbalanced it could have been a GOP campaign ad... but it wasn't. I was so angry over the irresponsible reporting, I turned to a different channel. Unfortunately, I was not watching with my DVR on television, so I cannot provide a transcript.

This comes after watching all 3 of the news networks earlier today beating the John Kerry story into the ground. On MSNBC, the question kept being asked if the Kerry story had legs and would cost the Democrats the election. It got to the point, where one wonders if this isn't all just wish fulfillment.

Many seem to believe that Fox is the only problem. However, it pervades CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC and ABC, as well

And that's just the broadcast outlets. The print media is no better.

A little while ago, I took a gander at the latest news from Media Matters to see if they were seeing some of the same things I was. I highly recommend a daily visit to their site, so any illusion that these nets are 'fair' and 'balanced' can be seen for the partisan outlets that they truly are.

In the past I have joked about flinging shoes and other objects at my TV over various subjects.

Well last night it happened for real.CBS Nightly News was on and Katie Couric brought on a story on electronic voting machines.

I thought "great the MSM is picking up on it"Well as the report went along they talked about poll worker errors, voter errors, etc. etc.The only mention of machine errors or fraud was to bring on a Diebold rep to proclaim how their machines were the most secure of all and how they have been certified as such all over the country.

At that point a slice of 4 cheese pepperoni pizza left a greasy skid mark across the screen.

And why is an important documentary, Hacking Democracy, only available on HBO?

From HBO.com on Hacking Democracy:

Diebold software, or other software like it, is installed in thousands of counties across 32 states. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, says the problem is that there are "lots of people involved in writing the software, and lots of people who could have touched the software before it went into that machine. If one of those people put something malicious in the software and it's distributed to all the machines, then that one person could be responsible for changing tens of thousands of votes, maybe even hundreds of thousands, across the country."

In Florida, Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho presided over a trial "mini-election" to see if the vote could be hacked without being detected. Before votes were actually cast, computer analyst Harri Hursti "stuffed the ballot box" by entering votes on the computer's memory card. Then, after votes were cast, the results displayed when the same memory card was entered in the central tabulating program indicated that fraud was indeed possible. In other words, by accessing a memory card before an election, someone could change the results - a claim Diebold had denied was possible.

Ultimately, Bev Harris' research proved that the top-secret computerized systems counting the votes in America's public elections are not only fallible, but also vulnerable to undetectable hacking, from local school board contests to the presidential race. With the electronic voting machines of three companies - Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia - collectively responsible for around 80 percent of America's votes today, the stakes for democracy are high. ----Why isn't this on the front page of every newspaper and distributed by the wire services?